Ebadi Wins Battle To Publish Memoir

Readers of this blog will remember that I was deeply disturbed by the fatwa that the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control had issued last year, and which created all sorts of rules and requirements on publishers who wanted to put out work written by writers from embargoed countries (notably Iran, Sudan, and Cuba). Many in the writing community worked hard to expose the foolishness of the rules, and their threat to freedom of speech in this country. Organizations like PEN, AAUP, and AAP even used the time-honored tradition of suing the government in order to win the right for foreign writers to publish their work. Thanks to their work, OFAC finally backed down last month and cancelled the rules.

So it’s especially delightful to see that Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi will, at long last, be able to publish her memoir here. (Ebadi was a plaintiff in the lawsuit mentioned above.) Here is the description of the sale from Publishers’ Marketplace.

Non-fiction: Memoir: Iranian Nobel Peace Prize-winner Shirin Ebadi’s memoir, painting a vivid picture of the struggles of a woman whose spirit has remained strong in the face of political upheaval, persecution, and the challenges that women around the world face as they raise families and pursue their work, chronicling her childhood and upbringing before the Revolution up through her life as a mother and as an advocate for the oppressed and her tireless efforts to promote human rights — in particular, the rights of women, children, and political prisoners in Iran, to David Ebershoff at Random House, by Wendy Strothman at The Strothman Agency (world, excluding Iran).

We’ll definitely look forward to reading it, here at Casa Moorishgirl.